Response of circulation and heat transport in the North Atlantic to changes in thermohaline forcing in northern latitudes: a model study

Abstract

To avoid an explicit simulation of the overflows across the Greenland-Scotland ridge, many models of the large-scale ocean circulation seek to include the net effect of the inflowing dense water masses by restoring temperature and salinity near the ridge to observed conditions. In this paper the authors examine the effect of different datasets for the northern restoring condition in two versions, eddy resolving and non-eddy resolving, of the model of the North and equatorial Atlantic that has been developed in recent years as a Community Modeling Effort for WOCE. It is shown that the use of smoothed climatological fileds of temperature and salinity south of the Denmark Strait leads to strong deficiencies in the simulation of the deep flow field in the basin. -from Authors